Google result counts

There has been plenty of speculation on the web over the years about the result counts listed from Google searches. I have my own bit of interesting Google search result trivia.

Before TurboGears’ release, searching for the word turbogears would yield a few dozen automotive-related hits, which makes sense because it wasn’t really a word or a brand name before now.

This morning, a search for turbogears yields 210,000 results. That number is so large that I find it hard to believe that even counting automatically-generated archives of things will yield anywhere near that number of pages. So, I decided to jump through the results. Google’s results took me to “981-984 of about 210,000”. Even on the *last page* of results, it was still saying 210,000. Odd, huh?

While I know that Google has always claimed that the result counts are estimates, I wonder how they compute the estimate… Even Yahoo seems inflated at 15,600.

Maybe Google’s just out to make vanity searchers happy 🙂